NEWS OF TIIE WEEK.
THE President's Message was read in Congress on the 4th inst., and has been most warmly received. We have explained its general drift in another column, and need only remark here that the moderate Republican party throughout the Union consider it more favourable to freedom than we are able to do. They ap- parently attach great importance to a clause in which the President expresses his wish that the rights of the blacks should be enforced, and forget that in recommending the re-admission of the States without guarantees, except for abolition, he gives up the power of interfering to ensure those rights. The message is calm in tone, less discursive than many such documents have been, slightly mag- niloquent on the position and prospects of the Union, and earnest in its deprecation of military authority—a view in which General Grant, it is believed, strongly coincides. Towards England it is cold, but not hostile ; towards France silent ; towards China markedly cordial—a quaint, but not ineffective, bit of haughty satire on European self-importance. For the rest, Mr. Johnson, like all Americans, looks away from existing troubles to a glowing future, sees the " eight or nine States nearest the Gulf of Mexico" full of emigrants from the North and from the " most cultivated nations of Europe," and bursts into poetry over the home offered to all the nations of the earth. The message is, in fact, a fair ex- pression of the average Western mind as interpreted by a man of strong sense and weighted with heavy responsibility.
